Take a small keyword nich, for instance. Backlinks help tremendously in helping search engines to determine relevance. This is common knowledge in SEO.

Ironically, however, some niches I'm experimenting with are currently showing very low- to non-existent back link counts. This directly effects initial positioning.

In another niche I've identifed, the 'leader' had 10 backlinks. One had 0 with a pagerank of 6. What?

Regardless of how pagerank is currently used or not, its data.

In any case back links help.